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About the poisoning of Litvinenko, a British source speculates to me that it’s unlikely the UK authorities would have called an emergency meeting of Cobra, the Downing Street crisis management team, unless they already have a pretty good idea who did it. If that is so, we may be looking at an exercise in containing a lot more than simply the Polonium-210. If it’s true, as Litvinenko reportedly said on his deathbed, that the trail leads all the way back to Russia’s President Putin, then — shades of the 1981 plot to kill the Pope – there looms the old Russian question, shto dyelat? — what to do?
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Brian:This is very scary stuff. With the windfall profits Russia (=Putin) is realizing from the sale of oil, we see a resurgent Russia, one which is beefing up it’s intelligence apparatuses for a wide variety of purposes, re-equipping it’s military with modern weapons, and otherwise becoming a huge threat to American interests, perhaps even a greater threat than the old Soviet Union was.
Consider, for example, how impotent the UN is, except in it’s ringing criticisms of the US; how unconcerned the Europeans are about the changes that are swamping western civilization in Europe; the absence of a European military (meaning the only power Europe has is the soft power of negotiation); that Mother Russia currently supplies Western Europe with something like 25% of it’s natural gas, and would be foolhardy not to use that as an economic weapon in furtherance of her interests; that the US elections and recent rumblings about the US engaging Syria and Iran about helping solve the Iraq “problem” are being interpreted as a “stop the war now or soon” vote. (Parenthetically, if I were Iran and Syria, I’d step up the violence specifically to avoid providing face-saving cover for the US’s withdrawal from the Middle East. I’d want to leave no question in anyone’s mind about who won and who lost.)
Now, it may well be that the US voters went Demo. because of various frustrations about corruption, big government, and the tactics in Iraq, as opposed to the goals there . . . but the message the American voters might think they are sending to the US government is being interpreted quite differently — as a lack of will to fight — by those opposed to US policy, be they Syria and Iran, Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, the far left here at home and in Europe, or Russia, China and Pakistan.
If this tide of assassination, aggression and intimidation by hostile regimes — and I count Russia right in there with the Islamists and NoKors, with other countries in the wings awaiting developments (China and Pakistan) — is to be stopped, at a minimum, the US public is going to have to stop sleepwalking through it’s postmodern torpor.
Brian
Nov 25, 2006 - 2:12 pm Ron McGregor:Extremly well said,Brian
Nov 25, 2006 - 6:12 pm george:Putin did it!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nov 27, 2006 - 11:49 pm